Clarissa's Blog

Reader el asks:

I wondered whether you would like to write about the differences between Victorian, modernist and post-modernist (especially about the last two, which may sound as a Chinese to non-professional) literature, and which one you like best & why.

This is a very interesting question for me. Victorian literature is part of the great European realist tradition that I absolutely love. This is what I read for enjoyment and what I choose every single time I want to have fun reading. Intellectually, I realize how important and beautiful modernism and post-modernism are but I rarely feel actual love for these books.

Modernism fascinates me as an artistic, cultural, and social phenomenon. This is why instead of reading books by modernists, I read many books about modernism. Last night, for example, I stayed up until 3 am because I couldn’t drag myself away from a book titled Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism (2012). The book is sensational, and I will publish I review when I’m done, by the way. But as for actual modernist artists, I only like very few. Faulkner, for instance. Virginia Woolf bores me. James Joyce is a bane of my existence. Valle Inclan gives me nightmares. I recognize that they are great writers, but I don’t like reading them. I do slightly better with modernist poetry, especially in Russian (Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Mandelshtam).

Among post-modernist writers, I have a few favorites, mostly from Spain and Latin America. Juan Goytisolo, Jose Donoso, Manuel Vilas.

I will write separate posts on my understanding of realism, modernism, and post-modernism because otherwise this post would be interminable. I ask the purists among us to understand that a blog post is not an equivalent of a conference talk or a scholarly volume. I will be simplifying and condensing a lot. Also, I obviously have my own vision of these movements, and it’s perfectly fine to have several competing visions.